Abstract:

Higher education institutions face the challenge of meeting the rapidly changing conditions of the labour market in the context of training suitable graduates. Cross-sectional requirements, such as digitalisation skills, sustainability awareness, globalisation as well as successful value creation through interdisciplinary thinking and action. In addition, there is a demand for rapid employability in the workplace, which requires application-oriented education. At the same time, universities are competing more intensively for the decreasing number of new students.

A successfully tested approach to meeting these challenges is presented in the following article and deals with the success factors in the introduction and implementation of cross-university learning factories in the form of virtual companies, on which the teaching content of different courses of study can be oriented in an interdisciplinary manner. The first learning factory implemented here has the business model of a vehicle manufacturing company and is not only virtual, but also constructs and produces real vehicles on a scale of 1:14.

The first step was to analyse which departments of this company could be filled with which competences of the present degree programmes. Then, in a bottom-up procedure, lecturers were identified who were interested in a corresponding orientation of the lectures, theses or research group topics and could thus lay the foundation for application-oriented scenarios of the learning factory. The initial focus here is the industrial engineering course, which deals with all in-house development aspects for the individual components of the vehicles in several lectures, for example in the areas of computer-aided design, production technology and quality assurance. Furthermore, parts of the mechanical engineering course are involved in the design activities. Another focus is on the development of driver assistance systems for fleet vehicles, in which the courses in business informatics, telematics, traffic systems technology and automation technology are involved and which will form a special focus in this article. Other study programmes deal with different scenarios of the learning factory, for example logistics, finance, risk management, human resources, operations research and many more. Experience to date has shown that the orientation of content to a common theme leads to many other synergy effects. For example, the participating lecturers know much better about the teaching and research content of their colleagues, since they exchange information about possible thematic links in regular meetings. Furthermore, a large number of companies are already involved in the teaching content of the learning factory, as these can fit very well into the application-oriented and sequential scenarios of the virtual company. The digital and interdisciplinary competences of the lecturers and students are also sustainably increased by the accompanying digital services that were established especially for the learning factories, for example a digital cloud repository, agile project management tools, common development tools and a sophisticated know-how management. Another added value is the improved study orientation, as the application-oriented and coherent scenarios present a very simple and pictorial impression of possible occupational fields.

This article will give examples of the experience gained so far and an outlook on the potential for further development.

Keywords:

Learning Factories, Interdisciplinary Teaching, Digital Framework for model based Development, Challenges for the Higher Education.